Now They're Blaming This On Gays

Here I was, worrying that a President who's even worse on civil liberties than George the Younger would use the Ebola outbreak as an excuse to trample whatever rights we still have.

Well, my worries were misplaced.  Governors Christie and Cuomo didn't wait for Obama to out-Bush Bush. Not long after they ordered mandatory quarantines of people suspected of having the virus, a nurse returning from volunteering with  Medecins sans Frontieres in Africa is treated to a new version of stop-and-frisk--in Newark Liberty Airport.

(You can't make this shit up.)

But, as bad as Kaci Hickox's experience was, I am now even more worried about some folks in Africa.  As an example, Leroy Ponpon is one of many Liberians who might lock himself in his flat because of the virus.  If he doesn't do that, he has another option:  He can lock himself in his flat (in Monrovia) because he's gay.

In his country, church leaders are telling people that Ebola was a curse sent by God to punish sodomy.  That is, really, not surprising:  LGBT people have been blamed for the Newtown Massacre, Hurricane Katrina, the economic disaster of post-World War I Germany, Superstorm Sandy, the events of 11 September 2001  and all manner of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, floods, climate change and other natural and human-caused disasters. Oh, and let's not forget the AIDS epidemic.

But attributing the Ebola outbreak to gays takes on a particular virulence in a country in Liberia.  An acquaintance of mine hails from that country , when asked about LGBT rights in Liberia, says, "You can't say both in the same sentence."  As far as I know, he's straight.

Still, he says, the situation for gay and lesbian people in his homeland is better than it is in neighboring Sierra Leone and  Guinea.  Those nations and Liberia are, in turn, like San Francisco, Berlin and Montreal in comparison to nearby Nigeria.

Now, having never been in Africa and having almost entirely positive experiences with the Africans I've met, both here in North America and in Europe, I have no wish to paint the continent as a hotbed of homophobia.  Interestingly, in another of Liberia's neighbors--Cote d'Ivoire--has never criminalized same-sex relations conducted in private, though public same-sex sexual acts are considered punishable offenses. 

So how is it that Liberia and its other neighbors have such restrictive laws, and nearby Nigeria has ones that are draconian, even by the standards of such stalwarts of LGBT rights as Putin's Russia?  One reason is that Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea were colonized by Great Britain during the Victorian era, when sexual mores were more repressive.  While Liberia doesn't have that history, it was founded by freed American slaves who were infused with the conservative Christianity of their time and their former masters.

Cote d'Ivoire, on the other hand, was--as its name indicates--a French colony.  Thus, its laws about homosexual relations are basically the same as the ones that prevailed in France at the time it ruled.  When you think of it, the law reflects a French attitude that persists even today:  Everyone there knows that certain people, some celebrities and others members of the local community, are gay.  But it is not discussed and, for the most part, the French don't care--as long the gay people in question keep it as leur propre affaire.

One might wonder why the other countries I've mentioned haven't updated their laws about LGBT people.  After all, the British colonizers haven't been in those countries in decades, and Liberians are several generations removed from their history as slaves.  The reason, I believe, is that all of those countries are still bound by another, and more insidious kind of colonialization.  The kind I'm talking about wasn't brought by merchants or by men in uniforms who arrived on gunships.  Rather, the ones I'm talking about--who probably never saw themselves as colonizers--sometimes wore clerical collars and habits.  Or they were the kinds of modestly-dressed people one sees handing out pamphlets on street corners.

I'm talking about religious missionaries.  They brought with them their churches' attitudes about sex and family that prevailed in their home countries at the time they arrived.   Nigeria in particular was affected:  It now has, arguably, the most conservative Christian church--the local Roman Catholic--on the continent.  (Indeed,  in part because of his conservativism,  Father Francis Arzine was considered a leading candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II.)  Nigeria also is home to Boko Haram, in the mainly-Muslim northern part of the country.  The organization's name means, "Western education is forbidden."  That, I think, says a lot about their attitudes toward women, let alone homosexuality. 

Between the Boko Haram and a conservative Catholic church, how much respect--let alone tolerance--would you expect to find for LGBT people?

If anything, the surprise is that some bishop or imam there didn't beat Liberian officials in blaming LGBT people for the Ebola epidemic.

 

Clarity After The Tempest

Last night, after work, I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see a production of The Tempest by Shakespeare. It turned out to be exactly what I wanted, and needed.

From the first time I read the play--more years ago than I'll admit!--I used to identify with Caliban more than any other character I have encountered in literature. Sometimes I still do. After all, he is reviled simply for being: he is the deformed child of Sycorax, a witch long dead by the time Prospero arrives in exile. He is also the only non-spiritual native of the island.

Ron Cephas Jones, the actor who portrayed Caliban, was amazing: He conveyed so much of his character's anger, subversiveness--and humanity--through his eyes alone. With his performance, even someone who's never before read or seen the play could be convinced that "You have taught me language/And the profit on't is, I can curse" can come out of the same mouth as the one who, not much more than an hour later (The action in the play takes place in real time, in contrast to most of Shakespeare's other plays, in which the action can take place in several locations and time frames.) would give us the speech that begins with "Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." To me, that speech is the single most beautiful piece of writing in the English language.

I used to identify with Caliban because I long felt like the "ugly duckling" of my family, school, and of just about any group, institution or situation of which I was a part. I was always under suspicion and therefore expected anyone who had any sort of authority, or simply any kind of approval that I didn't have, to abuse it--against me. Sometimes I still do.

Perhaps some of you will think that I am painting myself as a victim when I say that to get through any given day from the time I was about five until I was forty-five, I had to lie, connive or in some other way be untruthful to myself or deceitful to others. Some people would say that I'm living a lie now: They have said, and continue to say, things like "Just accept that you're a man and deal with it!" Well, that's exactly what I told myself for all of those years--that I am a man and would have to deal with it. Turned out that the first part of that statement wasn't true and that "dealing with" what is true involved doing things that have cost me relationships, not to mention material wealth.

Now, I am not going to get into some discourse in post-colonialism, mainly because I think a lot of the so-called postcolonialists , or people who fancy themselves as such, say some completely absurd and sometimes offensive things, which is a consequence of generating and disseminating arguments that have little, if anything, to do with the issues some postcolonialists suppose themselves and their arguments to be about. (Then again, one can say that for just about any other school of literary criticism or any other "ism.") However, while I am not entirely convinced that Shakespeare was writing a critique of colonialism, slavery or the oppression of women (Miranda, Prospero's daughter, is the only female character seen for any significant amount of time throughout the play.), I think that no one better understood human dynamics, particularly in relation to power and the way it is used and abused. Plus, I can't see how Shakespeare--who, though brilliant, was still a product of his place and time--could not be concerned with issues of revenge, forgiveness and redemption. They are the underlying powers of The Tempest, as they are of so many of his other plays. In fact, it now occurs to me that in that sense, Les Miserables--which, I believe, is still the best novel ever written--is a sort of great-great-great-niece or -nephew of The Tempest.

Anyway...A great thing about the production I saw was that it gave a clear sense that Prospero's relationship with Ariel was, in some ways, as exploitative as his relationship with Caliban. Of course, that was not something I could see when I was addled by the anger I used to feel so strongly that for a long time I could not understand the real source of my anger. Prospero released the "airy spirit" from a tree and keeps him in his debt with a promise to release him from it one day.

It's odd that last week, I was taking the "E" train home from work and saw it as a modern-day slave ship. It runs underground for its entire length and is usually full, which made me think of slaves chained to each other in the lowest levels of the ship. And everyone on that train was going to or coming from a job that was serving someone who had power--sometimes of life and death--over them. And they continue to go to and from those jobs, and submit to the rules and sometimes caprices of their employers out of a fear that they and/or those they love will not survive if they don't submit. Finally, some of them have some vague belief that if they work long and hard enough, and continue to "keep the faith," they and their loved ones will one day be free from worry and want. Their employers--or, more precisely, the culture they represent, if unwittingly--promulgates those beliefs. Anyone who questions, much less challenges, them won't be long for his or her job, and possibly this world.

But this is not to paint such people--or Ariel--as naive simpletons. Rather, they instinctively understand that rebellion and subversion are, by definition, the loneliest of enterprises. Also, sometimes people don't have any choice but to avail themselves to some "rescue" or another, none of which ever comes without some price or another.

I don't know whether it was the production I saw that caused me to finally understand what I've just described about Ariel and his relationship to Prospero. But that relationship was clearly and fully realized in that production. That alone made it worth seeing.

And I now realize that, whatever scars and resentments we have had in common, I have finally become, at least in one way, fundamentally different from Caliban--or, for that matter, Ariel: Now that I have freed myself, at least in a spiritual and psychic sense, I want to do what I can to help others--or, more precisely, help them to develop their means--to break from whatever's enslaving them. I also hope that they'll understand that life is, among other things, an unending process of liberating one's self. Whether we are liberated through pardons, forgiveness, redemption or our own enterprise, there is always another box to emerge from. And for each one there is a different way out.

Now, if I could only do it all as perceptively, and in such beautiful and precise language as Shakespeare rendered it all!